On May 30, 1999, Eurekan Henry Robertson stood next to
Courtney Love and assisted as a Tibetan monk took the ashes of Love's late
husband, Kurt Cobain, and placed them in the top section of a wooden urn
along with ribbons of prayers and incense. The box-like bottom section of
the urn, called a stupa, was filled with some of Cobain's favorite
things -- a few CDs, a can of mandarin oranges, a guitar string, bags of
tea. But when they tried to include a record album by the Sex Pistols, Never
Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, it was half an inch too large
and had to be left out. Finally, the stupa was sealed, never to be
opened again.

How did Robertson, a 50-year-old part-time teacher,
artist, chef and businessman, come to play a role in the top secret ceremony
laying to rest the remains of a man Rolling Stone called "Theartist
of the decade" -- a ceremony so secret it has yet to appear in any
national press, including Rolling Stone?

HENRY ROBERTSON WORKS AS A TEACHER FOR
THE CHILDREN'S Art Academy and leads art classes at local schools. He is
also part owner of a travel business. His wife, Carol, was among the long-time
managers of Dalianes World Wide Travel who bought the company not long ago
from the retiring owners.

For the last few years, up until its recent
closure, Robertson worked weekends as a chef at the City Grill in Henderson
Center. He is also a skilled woodworker who runs his own business, Custom
Wood, crafting furniture and cabinets.

Robertson was born in Ohio. His father
was in the Air Force and the family moved around the country a lot. After
a stint in the Army including service in Vietnam, Robertson moved to Humboldt
County.

"I came here to take advantage of
the GI Bill, to attend school, to become a craftsman," he said. "I
went to College of the Redwoods and studied fine arts and industrial arts
a bit of woodworking, metalwork, jewelry, pottery, sculpture the basics."

After school he would often eat Italian
food at Tomaso's in Eureka where he fell in love with one of the waitresses.
They married and settled in Eureka. Carol went to work for the travel company
and Henry set up a woodworking business.

He started out with a company called East Bay Woodworks,
a partnership with Larry Dern (who now owns the Metro in Arcata with his
wife, Michelle) where they built custom cabinets and furniture.

After two years they parted ways and Robertson
established Custom Wood. On the side he made picture frames at the Art Center,
then worked at Restoration Hardware as manager of the tool section.

In 1983 he took some time to build a number
of finely crafted furniture pieces for himself, put together a show at the
Art Center and a portfolio that landed him a job teaching woodworking at
CR.

Early on Robertson was drawn to the Eastern
religions. A close friend he met in Vietnam was studying Tibetan Buddhism
and, after returning to the states, Robertson, too, became a practicing
Buddhist.

Combining his interest in Buddhism with
his skill at woodworking, Robertson began to establish a niche market for
his art which led to some hefty commissions. In the early 1980s he invited
his guru, Lama Lodro, from San Francisco, to visit Humboldt County. While
staying at Robertson's house in Eureka, the monk saw the handmade furniture
and asked if he might be interested in building a throne for Kalu Rimpoche,
the senior Kagyu Lama who is Lama Lodro's guru.

"The throne is actually a teaching seat," Robertson explained.
"It's a graduated box with stairs and a back. The High Lama sits on
it to give teachings while those listening would be on floor level. The
back and the front have intricate carvings and I drew imagery from Buddhist
iconography to design images for the throne."

Building the piece led to other commissions.
A wealthy Buddhist in New York had seen an exhibit on Tibetan art at the
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and had Robertson build a replica of an
18th century ceremonial object he saw there, a representation of a wrathful
deity, an ebony skull pierced by a flaming trident.

Seeing even more marketing possibilities,
Robertson decided to advertise on a small scale.

"I was a businessman looking for Buddhist
business," he said. "I made up postcards of the piece and sent
them out to meditation centers around the United States, hoping to spark
interest in my Buddhist work.

"I got one reply. It was from the
Dali Lama's monastery in Ithaca, N.Y. They were interested in having a throne
made for his holiness the Dali Lama, for his western seat, Namgyal Monastery
in Ithaca."

Working from a photograph of the Dali Lama's
favorite throne, Robertson spent 1994 building a modified replica, shipped
the throne to Ithaca and flew out to assemble it in the shrine room.

In April
of 1994, in Seattle, Wash., Kurt Cobain, lead singer of a band called Nirvana,
put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.

Nirvana had come together in 1986 and helped
create a new style of rock by merging punk anger, heavy metal thrash and
pop hooks. The music press dubbed it "grunge." The album, Nevermind,
yielded the major hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and Cobain was
crowned king of grunge. Like it or not, he became a rock star.

In 1992 he married Courtney Love, leader
of her own band, Hole. When Cobain died, her band had just completed its
most successful album, Live Through This. And that is exactly what
Love had to do.

She had Cobain's body cremated. Reports say some
of the ashes were buried in the back yard of their Seattle home, some placed
in an urn. She negotiated with two Seattle cemeteries for interment; one
refused outright, the other demanded $100,000 a year for increased security.

Eventually Love put the ashes in a teddy-bear
shaped knapsack along with her wedding dress and traveled to New York, according
to a story in Esquire. She met with a Tibetan monk, head of the monastery
in Ithaca, and wanted to know about the Tibetan rituals for the dead. Without
coming to a decision on what to do, she left for Los Angeles, only to return
to Seattle with the ashes in July 1995.

She spent two weeks at Namgyal chanting
with the monks as they consecrated the ashes. According to canon, they were
mixed with clay and formed into small cones called tsatsas. The next step
was to build a shrine known as a stupa.

"When I arrived in Ithaca to set up
the throne," said Robertson, "Courtney had been there the week
before with Kurt's ashes. She had this stupa project in her mind, and with
my background I was the logical choice to build it.

"A stupa is a reliquary, an enshrinement
for relics, typically of departed holy men. When the Buddha died when he
left to go into nirvana his disciples said, `What do we do now? Who do we
worship?'

"He was kind of beyond all that, but
he told them, `Okay, you build this thing and put part of me in it and this
thing will be exactly the same as me, the same as my mind.'

"The stupa symbolizes the enlightened
mind. In its highest sense, the stupa is the mind of the Buddha. It's what
he left behind for people to have a physical thing to worship.

"There are stupas in all sizes. Some are huge,
the size of city hall, then there are very small ones, an inch tall. It
depends on where they are going to go. They usually contain the remains
of some holy man, but somebody with money would do this for their deceased.
The ceremony consecrates it so the stupa is like all the others, the enlightened
mind of the Buddha.

"Courtney wanted something that is
called a nirvana stupa. I worked with the monks and came up with the appropriate
design. These things are done according to Buddhist canon, according to
certain proportions. What I had to do was make it the proper size for the
ashes of one person."

In his wood shop in Eureka, Robertson set
about building the stupa using four types of wood paduke, satinwood, maple
and mahogany.

"The very top crown parts were gold-leafed.
The top is like an inverted bell, a lathe turned piece made from 80 pieces
of wood. It's what you call brick-laid, with alternate layers of segments.
There are rings, each one with eight pieces in it on 10 levels, all bonded
together, then turned. The bell shape holds the ashes and prayers and goes
on top of a box."

While the piece was completed three years
ago, it took a long time for Love to get everything lined up for the last
ritual. Twice she made arrangements for a monk to come from Ithaca and for
Robertson to fly to Washington, then canceled at the last minute. Finally
on Sunday, May 30, the day before Memorial Day, the ceremony took place.

"They serendipitously rescheduled
it on the Buddha's birthday and Nirvana day," said Robertson. "The
day he entered nirvana was the same as the day he was born. You can't ask
for a higher day."

The private ceremony was attended by Cobain's immediate
family, a monk from Ithaca, another representative from the monastery who
had made the arrangements and Robertson, whose duties included assisting
the monk in filling the stupa and its final assembly.

According to Robertson, "The tsatsas
were placed in the bell along with rolled-up prayers on long ribbons of
paper. There were probably 200 mantras, prayers to all of the deities in
Tibetan Buddhism, arranged with the highest Tantric deity on top and the
others all the way down, then the ashes are put in and everything is intermingled
with powdered incense."

The top section was placed on top of a
box, which is "like a treasure chest filled with offerings," Robertson
said. "They could be anything people term precious, just good stuff,
things that will last eternally if that can be conceived.

"In Kurt's they put in CDs of music
he liked. There was a potpourri that had dried gardenia flowers in it, which
are special in Buddhism, some canned food, some tea, some rice flour, a
guitar string.

"We closed it up and sealed it and
it will never be opened again. Kurt's ashes are in this stupa that has been
consecrated to be a holy object and thus have become a representation of
the Buddha.

6. The cover of Rolling Stone May 13, 1999 (photo of Kurt
Cobain by Mark Selinger)

7. Cobain's Nirnana stupa consecrated in a ceremony at
an undisclosed location five weeks ago. "The stupa symbolizes the enlightened
mind. In the highest sense, the stupa is the mind of the Buddha."(photo courtesy of Henry Robertson)